My Long 5th of July Jewish Cultural Crawl in NYC

I planned to make my Friday, Fifth of July a Jewish Culture Crawl Day in New York, but I didn’t imagine all the unexpected directions it would take.

I’ve enjoyed other Jewish Cultural Crawls on vacation days, when I dash from one institution to another, ranging from museums to bookstores to Russ & Daughters for halvah. My agenda for July 5 started at the invaluable Center for Jewish History (CJH)  on W. 16^th Street with its five member institutions, then headed down to 81 Leonard Street south of Canal Street for the “Artists on Antisemitism” exhibit at the 81 Leonard Gallery. I also wanted to visit the Nova Music Festival Exhibition on Wall Street but it closed in late June.

A compellingly personal exhibit (courtesy of author).

The day began at 11 a.m. when I met a college friend, David, at CJH, long one of my favorite cultural institutions. I’ve attended events there and donated historical materials to the Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of German-Jewish History and Culture (LBI). Given my mother’s German grandparents and great-grandparents, LBI speaks to my ancestral connections.

In fact, I mentioned that to David as we started viewing LBI’s exhibit “Crossing the Ocean: Three Waves of German-Jewish Immigration to the United States, 1848–1950s.” I took particular pride in my great-great-grandfather, Rabbi Heinrich “Chayim” Schwarz, who immigrated from Germany to Texas in 1873. He received his rabbinical ordination from the renowned 19^th century Torah scholar Rabbi Meir Loeb ben Jehiel Michael, universally known as the Malbim. I wrote about the two rabbis in this 2019 post.

I never expected the exhibit would have a direct personal connection. But then David and I turned a corner, I looked up and my gaze was mesmerized by the image of . . .

Rabbi Chayim himself!

The exhibition included a panel with a photo I had seen before in books featuring Rabbi Chayim, showing him at his son’s wedding in Germany in 1884. I practically jumped up and down, pointing and jabbering to David, “Look, I recognize him, that’s him, my great-great-grandfather!”

Here I am with Rabbi Schwarz and the whole mishpocha, what a memorable encounter (courtesy of author).

The panel gives a biographical sketch of Rabbi Schwarz, mentioning that his daughters married into other German-Jewish immigrant families in Texas (daughter Valeria married my great-grandfather, Samuel Lissner), while four of his five sons married in Germany. The photo shows a family gathering at the 1884 wedding of Selma Weinbaum to Leonhardt Schwarz in Germany.

The CJH had other exemplary exhibits, including “The Dreyfus Affair in Postcards: Going Viral at the End of the 19^th Century.” One that especially caught our attention as something unknown to us, was “Runaway Husbands, Desperate Families: The Story of the National Desertion Bureau.” It presented cases from the National Desertion Bureau, which operated from 1905 to 1961 to locate and bring to justice Jewish husbands who abandoned their typically poor immigrant families. I could see this becoming a TV series in the budding genre of Yiddish-language programs such as Rough Diamonds and Unorthodox.

After David and I parted, the Great Fifth of July Jewish Culture Crawl continued in a straight walk down Broadway for a half-hour to Leonard Street. Along the way, I noticed Chabad Mitzvah Tanks parked on both sides of Broadway. Young members of Chabad canvass men walking on the street, asking if they’re Jewish and want to put on tefillin. Since I’m a member of a Chabad shul, I thought, when asked, “Of course! I always need the practice of getting the tefillin on right.”

Mitzvah Tank on Broadway (courtesy of author).

My enthusiasm might have surprised the boychiks, but they deftly placed the tefillin on my left arm and head and walked me through the prayers, where I also need practice. As I was leaving, I placed a dollar bill in a donation box, saying, “The Rebbe gave out dollar bills, so I’ll give you a dollar bill.” The practice paid off, as the boychiks placed the tefillin on my left arm in a way that kept the box much more securely positioned than I had ever achieved. Thanks to my Jewish Culture Crawl, I no longer suffer from the “droopy tefillin” syndrome. I know this makes no sense to anybody who hasn’t worn tefillin, and the problem and resolution are much easier to view that to describe, but trust me on this.

The next and last stop was the 81 Leonard Gallery for the “Artists on Antisemitism” exhibit, organized by the gallery and Jewish Art Salon. While it appears at a moment when the tsunami of Jew-hatred revealed itself and found its latest rationalization after the October 7 pogrom, the 21-artist exhibit responds to antisemitism across time. References include Auschwitz, the Golem of Prague, artist Felix Nussbaum, Marina Heintze’s Yitler, a fusing of portraits of Adolph Hitler and Kanye West, and Crown Heights. Yona Verwer, founding director of the Jewish Art Salon and one of the show’s curators, did the piece Star Amulet. Isaac Ben Aharon’s portrait Our Voice—Ambassador Lipstadt depicts Holocaust scholar and the current U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt—who visited the gallery and saw the artistic vision of herself.

Star Amulet, by Yona Verwer (courtesy of author).

The art moved me and showed the range of artistic interpretations, redolent of fear and defiance, of antisemitism in all its forms. The exhibit runs through August 31.

I thought the day had ended, but Netflix had one more surprise in store for me back home. I watched comedian Hannah Einbinder’s special Everything Must Go. I’ve liked her work on the series Hacks so I wanted to see her comedy act. She’s a great mimic, highly physical, profane, honest about her medicinal history, and hilarious on her time as a high school cheerleader. At the finale, Einbinder steered into Jewish material where the audience couldn’t quite tell if she was serious or not. Reflecting on her sexual identity, Einbinder muses, “Bisexuals are the Jews of the LGBTQIA+ community. ‘Bisexuals, they’re just shapeshifting maniacal villians.  They’re not one of us.’ Sound familiar, Jews?”

She then defines and has the audience say “shalom,” explaining, “That’s all the Hebrew I know. I’m a bad Jew.” Einbinder continues to recount her grandmother’s funeral, where she inexplicably began singing a song in Hebrew, which I recognized as “Yerushaylim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold).” What’s going on here? You’ll need to watch the show to find out.

While Einbinder closed out the day itself, the day reverberated as I was eager to learn more about LBI’s exhibit on German immigration. I soon spoke with Magdalena Wrobel, LBI’s associate director of public history, about its evolution. She said other exhibits hadn’t covered in such depth the process of moving from one country or continent to another, and had focused on acculturation after arriving. Crossing the Ocean, by comparison, looked at the transition process from the decision to emigrate to arrival in the United States, and transnational family networks.

The timing worked well with a conference earlier this year on the 100^th anniversary of restrictions on immigration to the United States, which had fatal consequences for Jews attempting to leave Germany in the 1930s.

The Schwarz family portion resulted from a colleague Wrobel’s meeting a woman who is part of the extended Schwarz family and who shared family albums. The Schwarz material was appealing because it connected with all aspects of the exhibit: it’s a transnational story, the sons returned to Germany for wives, and the family integrated into U.S. culture. And German-Jewish story of the Schwarzes keeps rolling along because, here I am, 150 years later, writing about it as the highlight of my long and good Friday, Fifth of July Jewish Culture Crawl.

We must become our own golems (courtesy of author)

The golem we all need (courtesy of author).